Buying time

Well, yes, in a manner of speaking, you can buy time.

One way to buy time is when you put money in the parking meter. And, as with anything else, with the passage of time, it gets ever more expensive to do that.

In our area, it was actually for many years quite cheap to buy time. Up until about ten or so years ago, before the traffic people re-calibrated or, in some cases, replaced the parking meters in the downtown shopping area, a penny would get you six minutes, and a dime was good for an hour's worth of parking. This was when the parking meters in the great City of San Francisco were charging 25 cents for a quarter hour, or a dollar an hour.

These days the downtown parking meters in our suburb don't even take pennies anymore. You must have nickels, dimes, or quarters. But they are still cheaper than in San Francisco, where I discovered yesterday to my surprise that 25 cents will now get you only ten minutes of parking in the Richmond district — which equates to a buck fifty an hour.

That is if you are lucky enough to find an empty parking spot, which in the Richmond district is a job that requires circling around in your car and burning expensive fossil fuel for almost as long a time as you can realistically expect to park.

And the sign on the meter tells you that you are still liable to get ticketed if the meter happens to be broken. How about that for making you feel welcome in the City?